While Paul Manafort stared down his former protégé, Rick Gates didn't look at Manafort the entire time he testified against him

A courtroom sketch depicting Rick Gates, right, testifying against his former mentor Paul Manafort, seated second from left, at the Alexandria Federal Courthouse on Monday. Dana Verkouteren via AP

The former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort stared down his former protegé Rick Gates as he testified in Manafort's Virginia fraud trial on Monday.

But Gates didn't meet his former mentor's gaze or look at him once while testifying that he committed tax evasion and bank fraud with Manafort and embezzled money from him.

Gates is a cooperating witness in the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and is the prosecution's star witness in Manafort's trial.

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — The trial of the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort reached its most intense point so far on Monday.

Rick Gates, Manafort's protégé and closest associate of many years, turned against his mentor and delivered damning testimony under his former boss' icy gaze without looking in his direction even once.

Manafort, meanwhile, stared down Gates with a piercing, stone-cold glare while his former associate and mentee testified to committing tax evasion and bank fraud "at Mr. Manafort's direction."

Gates also admitted to stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Manafort by filing fake expense reports, which were then paid from foreign bank accounts illegally concealed from US authorities.

During his blockbuster testimony, Gates didn't meet Manafort's gaze or even look at him once, referring to him only as "Mr. Manafort" and carefully making eye contact with everyone in the room except him.

"I have seen some cold stares in my life, but watching Paul Manafort stare down his former deputy, arms crossed, as Rick Gates recounted the long list of his alleged crimes was remarkable," the CNN correspondent Jim Sciutto wrote on Twitter.

Gates first met Manafort in 1995 and was his close business partner and right-hand-man for nearly a decade while they worked as political consultants to Viktor Yanukovych, who became Ukraine's president, and his Party of Regions before both joining the Trump campaign in 2016.

The two men apparently hadn't been in the same room since February, when the two were charged with a combined 32 federal counts of tax evasion and bank fraud by the special counsel Robert Mueller's office.

Manafort is pleading not guilty to all charges, while Gates took a plea deal and became a cooperating witness in Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign's possible role in it.